Halfway finished already ????

How time flies by! I am already halfway through animationmentor - can't quite believe it myself, it still feels like I began just a couple of weeks ago.

These last days before christmas break we are summing up and reviewing what we learned in class 3 the past three months. It has all been about body mechanics, animating physicality, and I must say that this was the hardest class so far with lots of hard work on the assignments but also with a lot of new information and "stuff" pouring in all the time that somehow caused some kind of information overload in my poor head.
At this stage it really feels like I could stay at this level for months or years and just repeat the things I've learned so far, read the same stuff over, do the same kind of physicality exercises and work on getting to understand this complex area of animation better.

But - come january there will be new challenges as we go into acting classes. I'm really looking forward to that immensly, it will be a lot of fun.... but... I really could have used another three months of jumping and running and leaping and falling and balancing.

Here is my compiled "anim jam"-assignment from the advanced body mechanics class. I hope to get back to it later, in polish and portfolio class, and do some more polishing and maybe add some more detail to the setting.

Obvious? No, I don't think so.

I find this clip very, very interesting. We are all so used to the everyday phenomenon of gravity, it is all around us, all the time. We sit, we stand up, we walk, we lift things... and all the time there is this strong force pulling everything DOWN that we have to fight.You know? Apples fall to the ground. We have big, bulky muscles in our legs working hard to push us up everytime we rise up from a chair...  Gravity.

We are so used to all these things that we hardly ever think about it. We are so used to the force of gravity that we don't even SEE it happening.

Now, that is exactly what an animation student has to learn to see and understand. Gravity in action. And that is why I love this clip. Suddenly you see how STRONG gravity really is. It's pulling that man across the room! And you see how the acceleration of a falling object works - just look at that cup falling off the table. It's amazing, isnt it?

Actually this would be a really fun clip to use as a reference for an animation exercise...  :)

YouTube - Drunk tilted Room Sketch

First part of anim jam

Still some polishing to do on this one... and I didn't really have the time to meet all of Sean's notes especially on the setting... and the timing could also be pushed a little, it's still a little even - so if I get back to this one later I will have to work on it some more... But for now it's the final version of part 1.



And here is where I am at right now; planning and making rough blocking for part 2 of the airport story... I will have to push it a little, since I'm planning to take a couple of days away from school in two weeks. I'm going on a little trip to Bradford, England, to take part in the Bradford Animation Festival! Yippeee!

class 2: what bad planning can get you into

This was my final job from class 2 at Animation mentor.

I learned a lot from this assignment, the main lesson being, "it's no bloody good to be to sloppy in your planning, stupid!"

I wanted to do a nerdy dance of some kind ( and of course Stewie would have to perish at the end of it ) - so I searched for some funny clips and found these on youtube. Nothing wrong with them per se.



Fun references, right? Just to go ahead with planning? Yeah. So I did some sketches:

Here is the problem; I cheated, I didn't do them well enough! Breakdown positions weren't there! Worse; I didn't THINK about how the dance would transition from pose to pose. And even WORSE; I didn't really think of it in blocking either.

The result of this was that I made a first pass of blocking, noted all things I hadn't prepared well enough, had to start over and redo the blocking - just to find even more stuff that i should have thought of in the very beginning.  Highly frustrating when you KNOW that you could have avoided much of this by giving the whole thing a little more time in the planning stage!

The final clip looks like this, and I am NOT pleased with it. It lacks snappiness, feels slow and has not near enough "nerdiness" in it.  Because I was lost in all sorts of "redo it"-traps through the process and forgot about the big picture.



What can I say? A good learning experience, after all. :-)

Class 2 - Killing Stewie by weather

After Ballie the 2-legged poor bastard had been killed by getting crushed under a falling weight, the next in turn was Stewie - this time it was the armless version of Stewie we got to work on. A good thing really, it makes you concentrate on the hips and spine and learn to do that stuff before you get distracted with hands and arms. Smart thinking, AM.  :)

In this second assignment I wanted to let Stewie die in a horrible storm. (The actual title of the assignment was "walking in heavy wind". But I of course needed some death in there too, I have my theme of "horrible, unexpected deaths" to attend to.)

So this was my first scenario:

But as I timed out the scene it got a little too long... (we had to keep it under 200 frames)  so I simplified the whole thing and let him just blow off a cliff instead. Like this:

Our mentor, Leigh Rens, said his OK and three weeks later this was the result:





With a little grass waving hard in the wind and the occasional leaf flying by the illusion will be there, I think. Maybe I'll get back to those props and environment things if I ever get back to polishing this shot later on.

Soon I'll post the third assignment of this class. It's still not completely finished so you may have to wait a week or two for it.  Cheers!

Class 2 - psychology of body mechanics.

It's been a while since I updated anything, so now I thought that I would get my ass out of the wagon (don't know if that's understandable english but in swedish it's an often used expression) and show some of the latest stuff I have been working on at animation mentor.

By now we are getting into the final weeks of class 2, "psychology of body mechanics", and in this class we have been working on three different shots, all of them paying special attention to body mechanics.
I'll make a blog note on each of my three assignements, this is the first one, the other two will be coming up shortly.

So - when you are working on one piece for three weeks you might just as well make it fun and entertaining to yourself. Which is what i did. I decided to make my three pieces add up to a little series of "horrible, unexpected deaths".

The body mechanics assignment was to make a 180 degree turn. So I videotaped myself to get reference for the body mechanics stuff and made this planning sketch.

My mentor in this class, Leigh Rens (cool guy and awesome animator BTW!), liked the setup so I went ahead with this plan and for three weeks I worked on just this little piece.

But I needed a sudden death too, to keep my theme going. Some unexpected thing was what I wanted. It ended up looking like this:




If I get back to polishing this stuff I'll put a text on the weight saying: "property of Monty Python". LOL.